Before The Full Moon
by Ly
Summary: A Saiya-jin and Tsufuru-jin meet alone in the desert. A young Tsufuru-jin join’s the solder`s ranks. Three Saiya-jin`s caged in a research facility. And the coming moon, it’s glowing face pale death for all.


Zuki1

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_We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. _  
_~ ~ Marcel Proust_  
  
_As all things eternal and primordial reappear, so all things mortal return to the earth. Honor, old age, probity, justice, constance, virtue, and gentleness are all gathered into the cold tomb._  
_~ ~ Francis Quarles _  
  
_Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God._  
_~ ~ Jean Rostand_  


  


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**Chapter One: Three Days After The Full Moon  
  
**

He couldn't have known how badly she`d hurt him, that was true. Still, if he`d only thought ahead, he would have seen the only way it could end was with her death. But it had seemed completely harmless at the time, just a little game. Zuki knew better now, but 'now' was too late. _ Now_ the Tsufuru-jin were dead. That didn`t matter, they were just vermin. Nashi mattered. _Now_ Nashi was dead, and _ now_ there was this painful little ache in the center of his gut and nagging questions in the back of his mind that won`t go away.  
  
He should have killed her the first time she stumbled into the Clan`s territory. That would have saved him all this trouble. After all, that was what Saiya-jin did; they killed Tsufuru-jin. Of course sometimes Saiya-jin killed Saiya-jin, (Zuki knew that too well), and sometimes Tsufuru-jin killed Saiya-jin. The latter didn`t happen very often. When the Tsufuru-jin did make a kill it was always because of overwhelming numbers and powerful weapons. That was how they`d gotten Zuki`s older brother. They`d swarmed around him like ants and shot him to pieces with those damned guns of theirs. Zuki`d wiped the blood off what was left of Negi`s face, he hoped it had been enough. Negi would have trouble fighting in the Afterlife if dried blood clogged his nostrils and ears and blurred his vision.  
  
Negi`s death had been a costly blow to the Clan, but it had been the only one the Tsufuru-jin had dealt them. Zuki had, on the other hand, at sixteen years of age, killed seven Tsufuru-jin before the full moon. That was only slightly above average. After three nights of raides as oozaru, he and his clan had decimated a city with a population of more than a million. Despite previous failures, his clan was making a name for itself, they were proving their warriors were just as skilled as those of the other clans.  
  
The Tsufuru-jin weren't good at fighting, the only things they could do was build stinking cities, making unfair weapons, and talk. Gods, did they talk! That was all they ever wanted to do. Negotiate, Bargain, Conference, Talk.  
  
That`s what had cause all this hassle; Talk. He`d let her talk and then he`d talked back and she`d talked again and before he knew it they`d been conversing. Discussing ethics and morals and might vs. right. And he had, for the time being, put off killing her.  
  
When her father`s voice had broken their line of conversation, wavering and frightened in the wilderness, as though he was trying to reveal his position and despicable cowardice to every Saiya-jin and four-leged predator within five miles, Zuki had done the most ridiculously idiotic thing. He`d pretended to be asleep.  
  
Nashi had seen this for what it was, a ploy conceived by a simple mind to let her go without losing face. She`d high-tailed it and intercepted her father before he came into harm`s way. Zuki`d known she never come back. No one was that stupid. It was a good thing for her too, because if given another chance, he was going to kill her.   
  
But she did come back, and every time he put off his duty. Again and again and again. More than ten times. He wasn`t sure how many, all told. He`d never learned to count past ten. He`d never needed more than that. Zuki`s world was filled with little numbers. He owned two sets of furs and one steel knife he`d taken off a dead Tsufuru-jin. There were seven good caves, one river and three water holes in his clan`s territory. He had two living siblings, one dead.  
  
This lack of skill with numbers by no means qualified Zuki, or Saiya-jin in general, as stupid (his grandchildren would operate computers and fly spaceships) but it illustrated an extreme predisposition for living in the moment. When he needed more than ten, namely when he killed more than ten Tsufuru-jin, he had intended to find out what came after. Of course there was no way to know how many he`d gotten while in oozaru form, so counting had become moot.  
  
They`d talked a lot. It wasn`t as much fun as fighting, but it was interesting.  
  
All that was before the full moon.  
  
Nashi was dead, quite possibly by his own hand. He could never be sure, the few memories of being oozaru, beyond the feeling of pure elation and power, were disjointed and out of sync, and he was sure some of them were complete fabrications, though where they came from he couldn`t begin to guess. He could have done anything.  
  
Even if she had, by some perverted miracle, survived, she was dead. All the Tsufuru-jin were dead, some just didn`t know it yet. In just three nights, the Saiya-jin had destroyed more than half the large cities on Plantsei. There was seventeen nights of full moon left, it was just a matter of time. There might still be some survivors, but they`d be easy to pick off. Without their fortified cities and resources to recharge their weapons, they were helpless.  
  


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Zuki hunted thought the chard rubble, the scent of blood and smoke in his nostrils, looking for Nashi`s body. His friends glanced at him now and then from the shade of partially demolished buildings. Some were still sleeping heavily, exhausted from the previous night`s revelries, others laughing at Gobou`s jokes and eating meat which source Zuki had no doubt and felt no moral qualms toward. Tsufuru-jin, after all, were not Saiya-jin. He dug though the ruins, when he found a living Tsufuru-jin, he killed it. It was boring, all the males had been killed in the first round of fighting. Only women and children were left, and the few that were conscious were in no condition to fight back. Boring, but it kept up appearance. He knew the others were talking about him, snatches of their conversation`s, inundated with his name, drifted over, along with swirling sand on the desert winds. They were wondering why he was wasting his time with the games of young boys when he should be resting for the upcoming night. They`d ask him what he was doing later. He`d say he was bored and trying to kill the time, so to speak. They probably think he felt bad for the Tsufuru-jin so he was putting them out of their misery. He`d get some ribbing for it but it was better for them to think him weak than know he was a traitor. It wasn`t a good excuse but it was preferable to answering the question 'Why are you wasting your time with those miserable things? They`ll die on their own soon enough.' with 'Well, I was looking for the corpse of a Tsufuru-jin that I built a gradual but powerful emotional attachment toward because I feel guilty about her death.' That was probably overstating the situation, outsiders have always had trouble understanding and interrupting the internal feelings and motives of Saiya-jin. Still, he had almost certainly felt something for Nashi, though it would be next impossible to find a word for it in any human language. And of course he won`t of dreamed of such an answer. 'I was looking for a Tsufuru-jin I like.' would be enough to get him branded as a traitor. His friends would turn on him and he`d be killed. He was stronger than most of them but by no means the most powerful. He couldn`t let them know.  
  
It was probably a waste of time anyway. The city was bigger than anything Zuki knew of. He could never cover the whole thing before the sun render the bodies unidentifiable. Most had already been crushed or burned beyond recognition by falling rubble and the fire that had run though the city the night before. Many of his companions had burns on the pads of their feet from stepping on hot ashes. Zuki had no idea how it had begun. He knew Tsufuru-jin always cooked their meat. He assumed some a few of them had neglected to put their fires out in the hustle and bustle of fleeing for their lives. A more likely scenario was an electrical fire had been sparked by some downed power lines or torn wiring, but he, like all the other Saiya-jin, had only the barest bits of knowledge, inundated with fancy, about such things. That was going to change very quickly.   
  
  
  



End file.
